When I was four going on five, the Mickey Mouse Club started its march through time. At the helm was Jimmie. I had such a pre-school crush on him, I'd make up stories about meeting him and becoming his friend. And then, when I fell asleep, I'd sometimes have dreams about him. In one ongoing story I'd have snuck into the Mouseketeers' boys' changing room and was sitting on a beam far above their heads. I was content just watching Jimmie lead the boys. He was always cheery and often would lead them in song. This crush went on for three years. Bless you, Jimmie.
I set out to make this post about the differences between the Yin and the Yang of sexuality. Maybe I'll get there. But I just looked up Mouseketeer Jimmie and learned that James Dodd, known as Jimmie, was a skilled musician and composer! He wrote lots of the songs for the show, including the "Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me? (now spelling) M I C -- K E Y -- M O U S E!!" opening theme song. IMdb informs us:
By all accounts he was just the sort of person he played on The Mickey Mouse Club (1955)- decent, caring, deeply religious, and very much concerned for children and their welfare. All of the original Mouseketeers loved him, a love that was reciprocated, and all continue to speak well of him to this day.
When you're a horny young guy and you're attracted to other guys, especially when all contacts and potential contacts seem shrouded in a shame and fear I just couldn't quite grok, multiply that times two, as in 1 Man + 1 Man = double shot of testosterone. It was hard not to get a pulse increase every time I walked into a Men's Room. When I figured out what the furtive behavior, wide stances, even holes between the stalls were all about, my 'special secret' became tinged with the smell of old urine and fear. This is a sad memory, now, looking back. I'm glad that I somehow managed to form friendships and have sex in homes and apartments and, yes especially, outdoors.
What I didn't have much of were the progressive stages of exchanging glances, then speaking, then, if there's a green light, courtship and the procession around the bases..... all leading to love and romance. Men are that way, at least when they feel they have no other options. No, men just are that way. That Yang male part of me wants to score. My other half (but, hey, who's counting?) -- the ready-for-love more feminine Yin me -- ideally wants an ongoing relationship that leads, as quickly or as slowly as it needs to, to mutually wonderful consummation.
I guess that's why we invented phrases like "to hook up" -- we just couldn't keep on calling all kinds of sex "making love." The smart and sensitive Yin me can't quite wrap her mind around the "anything-for-an-orgasm" powerful, man-hungry Yang me. I wouldn't call myself conflicted, but when I here look back half a century, there's real poignance about all I missed.
The many male friends I have who are older than I grew up in way more uptight eras than I. How much armor we need to first recognize as such, then shed, piece by piece, with a lot of help from our friends. A bit of elicit sex now and then is nothing to be scorned. But when your formative adolescent years are dark dead ends when it comes to where to go and what to do with all the feelings welling up, when you have nary a role model and hardly a vocabulary to even think about this upwelling, this springtime of your love life gets rapidly frostbit. I send love and I sigh with you, my "1st-half-of-the-Twentieth Century" beloved male friends.
We have survived. Let us thrive!